Madison Wisconsin's Estate Planning Blog

Most of us know of someone who has been diagnosed with dementia. It is a costly, heart-breaking and life-altering syndrome that is nearly doubling in numbers of people affected worldwide every 20 years. Dementia has affected the likes of Norman Rockwell, E.B. White, Rita Hayworth, Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan, Charles Bronson, Margaret Thatcher and many other well-known people.
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Your estate plan, like your home, periodically needs a thorough polishing. Your life circumstances are constantly changing, and an estate plan that perfectly met your needs a couple of years ago may now be cluttered with outdated provisions or documents. With spring fast approaching, now is the time to dust off your estate plan to ensure that it will still achieve your goals, as well as to avoid unintended consequences that may arise as a result of divorces, deaths, births, or other changes that have occurred since the last time your plan was reviewed.

An obituary can be much more than just a dry announcement of the time and location of your funeral or memorial service. It can be a way to share your life story, communicating information about significant events and people, as well as important values you would like to impart to others. You do not need to leave this task for grieving family members to do after you pass away: Instead, writing your own obituary can be an important part of your estate planning that you can do today.

According to the Social Security Administration, a surviving spouse may be eligible to receive the deceased spouse’s full retirement benefits at full retirement age (“FRA”).  For survivor benefits only, FRA is 66 for anyone born before 1957, and it increases two months every year until it reaches 67 for those persons born in 1962 or later. (For a regular retirement or spousal benefit, FRA is 66 for anyone born before 1955 and it increases two months every year until it reaches 67 in 1960.)  (E.g., see http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10084.pdf.)

Genealogy has long fascinated many people, and it continues to be studied by those who are interested in discovering who they descended from and what those family members were like. Many of us have gazed at black and white or sepia-tone photos of ancestors whose names we don’t know and wondered about their lives, joys, trials, and accomplishments. Fortunately, today, there are many resources making it much easier to discover information about prior generations of our families.

People often wonder about the value of using irrevocable trusts in Medicaid planning. Certainly gifting of assets can be done outright, not involving an irrevocable trust. Outright gifts have the advantages of being simple to do with minimal costs involved, including the cost of preparing and recording deeds and the cost of preparing and filing a gift tax return. Many financial institutions have their own documents they use for changing ownership of assets so there are typically no out-of-pocket costs for the transferor.